Why Was Korean Excluded from Twitter’s New 280-Character Limit

The comparison between Tweets in Japanese and those in English [Twitter].

Twitter announced on September 26 that the social media site is dropping its 140-character limits, increasing the limit to 280 characters.

The social media site said in a blog post that they’re currently testing the longer character limits with a small number of users. The new service is tested in languages including English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are excluded from the test languages.

About the exclusion, Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen wrote, “Japanese, Chinese, and Korean can convey more information in a single character compared to other languages.”

Such decision of Twitter is supported by its research, which compared tweets written in Japanese and English. In the research, only 0.4% of tweets in Japanese reached the 140-character limit, while the portion increases to 9% in those written in English.

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu